The Left4Dead 2 demo is sorta only for people who preorder the game. Or at least, access to it now is, with it opening to the public in 2 weeks time.

However, if you go to gamestation, you can preorder it with no deposit, and no commitment to purchasing it from hem when it does come out. They will give you a card with a serial that you enter into the Xbox marketplace, or Steam, that lets you get the demo now.

On the brink of civil war, a cut-off floating Arcology far in the future (2045) seeks to unravel the mystery of what great disaster has befallen a seemingly post-scarcity global society.

So what niche is Splash Damage looking to fill with BRINK, their first original IP to be conceived in conjunction with Bethesda? Well, it’s an interesting one. At a glance it seems a mish-mash of ideas as far and wide as Mirror’s Edge (the ‘SMART’ movement system, which I shall cover more of later), Assassins Creed (one button free-running, only in first-person), and the vehicular class-based construction combat of Enemy Territory Quake Wars. Quite an impressive mix of ideas; and amazingly it seems like they’ve pulled it off with aplomb.

Single-player, fantasy-based roleplaying videogames are often a lonely, tedious experience. You spend hundreds of hours developing your character, trudging through predictable environments, and repeating the same attacks over and over again. Japanese developers in particular have a track record of making games where the core mechanic consists of battling against wave after wave of easily defeatable enemy, who exist solely to dispense the Experience Points you need to beat the more challenging and interesting boss encounters. Any time spent in combat with enemies who never realistically pose a threat is no fun, because a fight without some sense of peril is inevitably dull. Yet it’s become so commonplace in modern RPGs that fans of the genre have learnt to accept it and even name it: ‘grind’.